> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors.
This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue.
> Not enough focus.
This is a valid point but I think you're being too scorched earth with it like saying that Wikipedia shouldn't do any political outreach at all. If its millions of viewers hadn't seen the SOPA blackout, would it have been as successful? If it didn't fight for freedom of panorama and other copyright issues, would it be able to exist in the same form as now? Your suggestion is like telling Japan to go back to isolationism. Sure it might work if you're self-sustaining, but it's no way to run a global project.
> Non-free academic media is hurting the project.
If you are part of a university, you likely have access to such media. Many public libraries also have such access. Lastly, there's the Wikipedia Library. [0] I'm not sure what you want Wikipedia to do here past what it's already doing.
>> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors.
> This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue.
I do not contribute financially to wikipedia, despite being very interested in doing so, because of this issue.
I am sick and tired of seeing large amounts of properly formatted, well formed articles, written in good faith, deleted by the little hitlers protecting their precious wikipedia turf.
This "community issue" costs wikipedia several thousand of my dollars per year. I wonder how many other people decline to support them financially due to these "community issues" ?
You do know that each Wikipedia is community-run right? You'd rather the foundation take away the autonomy of each wiki and force it's own standards? That goes completely against what the project was started for and would quickly alienate the userbase. If you don't believe me, just look at the backlash behind the media viewer (search for "superprotect"), visual editor, and flagged revisions. You cannot dictate rules to a community-established project, each wiki has its own culture and precedents. Sure the foundation could go all dictator, but that would be the fastest way to cause a fork and destroy the goodwill of volunteers. You don't like the community, either whine like you are doing now, or go in there and contribute. You're being no different that someone complaining that their local beach is full of trash while doing nothing to help out, or—if your username has any relevance—someone who wants a feature/bug-fix in an open-source project but won't make any pull requests.
> This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue.
I don't agree. Choices in how the foundation spends it's money can amplify or diminish these concerns.
E.g. WMF has spent extensively to try to bring in a wider space of borderline editors rather than investing as much in infrastructure to soften the learning curve to retain and boost the participation of middle-tier editors, which exacerbates us vs them seige mentality... and the overuse of blunt tools to stem a rising tide of low quality edits at the cost of a poor experience for new contributors.
E.g. An example I'd cite for this is the extreme investment in "visual editing"-- which only barely manages to not mangle pages when its used-- over things like syntax highlighting.
Not all the blame in these areas falls on the WMF for sure. As an example, enwiki community factionlization around deletion blocked the deployment of revision flagging (basically supporting having 'release' versions of articles so that non-contributors are not constantly subjected to the very latest unreviewed revision of an article) which would have allowed radically less aggressive edit patrolling.
This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue.
> Not enough focus.
This is a valid point but I think you're being too scorched earth with it like saying that Wikipedia shouldn't do any political outreach at all. If its millions of viewers hadn't seen the SOPA blackout, would it have been as successful? If it didn't fight for freedom of panorama and other copyright issues, would it be able to exist in the same form as now? Your suggestion is like telling Japan to go back to isolationism. Sure it might work if you're self-sustaining, but it's no way to run a global project.
> Non-free academic media is hurting the project.
If you are part of a university, you likely have access to such media. Many public libraries also have such access. Lastly, there's the Wikipedia Library. [0] I'm not sure what you want Wikipedia to do here past what it's already doing.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...